Mind the Gap
Missing the absence of nothing
There used to be gaps. I clearly remember some of these gaps, but only for what fell into them. That’s the thing with gaps, they are an absence. They are | |. They are not really about what they are, but what they are not.
There is something in human nature that only considers gaps as something to be bridged, rather than accepting their nothingness. I will continue to cling to this as the reason why it took me so long to notice their near extinction. But now, I miss them. I don’t miss them because they were particularly meaningful, but their absence, the absence of these absences, is starting to weigh on me.
As a child, these gaps were moments when I had no work, homework or chore to complete, there was nothing on TV, I wasn’t engrossed in a book, I wasn’t hungry for a snack, none of my friends were around, and most significantly there was no social media because it didn’t exist. And so I would pick up a towel and dry dishes with my mom and chat, or I would go down to the basement and see what my dad was working on, or I would pick up a pen and paper and write down my thoughts… Sure, sometimes I’d cause trouble with my sister, sometimes I’d complain about being bored, sometimes I would quickly fill the gap with something unhelpful: there were distractions like the Nintendo Entertainment System and Duck Hunt, there was Lego and some of the books I read were not literature. I recall reading a paperback copy of Robocop 2.
But the gap meant that the cost of saying yes to something was low. I sat in front of a fan when it was hot, I watched thunderstorms roll in from the front porch, I joined my dad on bottle drops at the recycling depot, I sat with my mom and contributed very little to her solving a crossword, I tortured my mind dwelling on unrequited love and I even tried to write down my understanding of the meaning of life…
In later years, the gaps shrank a little, but still I could strike up a conversation with a stranger in a waiting room or a line up, I had room to contemplate and think. Sometimes the gaps were filled with unexpected laughter, sometimes with outrage at the world, sometimes they stayed empty and then I would stare into a void and contemplate nothingness.
But the gaps are gone. And it’s not that I have outgrown them, I don’t see them anywhere for anyone. They have been pasted over by a sort of primordial goop, an amorphous blob of nutritionless, calorieless, tasteless ooze that spreads over our days and seeps into every gap and crack and hermetically seals it off from every human interaction, intellectual brain wave and flight of imaginative fancy…
Did you know that there is an arrow in the FedEx logo? It’s easy to miss, the arrow is in the negative space between the E and the X, but once you see it, there’s no unseeing it. It’s easy to miss noticing something that was never there, but once you notice its absence has been removed, then its removal becomes an ache. This is no phantom pain, something that was really never there has been amputated.
For at least the past four years, there has almost never been a time when I am engaged in doing X, and I don't feel a pang of guilt for not doing Y. Even if X is mandatory, Y is also mandatory. So is Z. There seems to be an inexhaustible array of things to do or to pay attention to, and I feel there are consequences for slackening too much. I used to think perhaps this was just fatherhood. But increasingly it might simply be that the gaps are being engineered out of existence. I recently read of people describing a "second self"; there is a self that is active and a second self that is constantly monitoring the first self. Perhaps having two selves is exhausting and leaves no room for flights of fancy.